


like brothers on a hotel bed,

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2016 [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Brainwashed Bucky, Buffy Insert, Deities, F/M, Healing, Judgemental Characters, Loki and Buffy are a Team, Marriage, Married Couple, Mental Illness, Mind Magics, Mutual Antipathy, Norse Mythology - Freeform, Not Beta Read, Prompt Fic, Sequel, Steve and Buffy disliking each other, Team Dynamic, This got away from me, Wishlist_Fic, a little cracky, but not really, character flaws
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 10:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8797705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which Buffy dislikes Steve and she can't do that while he's all emo, so she fixes him. There. (Wishlsit, Day 6)





	

**Author's Note:**

> For Stellarluna35 who asked for more Vegas!verse, with Buffy seeing herself in Steve. It went sideways a little.
> 
> Title, as usual, from Deathcab for Cutie's Brothers on a Hotel Bed.

+

Buffy doesn’t particularly like Steve Rogers. 

It’s not a big thing, really, some people you click with, some you don’t. Most days, they’re civil to each other and she reigns Loki in when he gets nasty and it’s all puppies and polite sunshine.

Since her husband and Tony are firmly camped out in Team No Cap, too, it’s alright. They have fun, there.

Coulson tries to get her to put it into words once, why she doesn’t like Steve, expecting her to stutter, stumble and realize she has no reasons, but Buffy’s been around the block too often for that kind of pop psychology to still work. 

“He’s self-righteous. He doesn’t value other people’s opinions or emotions once he’s made up his mind. He thinks his way is best. He’s intolerant.”

“The forties – “

“Not racist, or even misogynist, Agent Coulson. He’s intolerant in more specific ways. He looks down on Tony for his alcoholism. He judges me and Natasha for our casual approach to violence. He’s uncomfortable with Loki and Thor because gods, lower case, don’t fit into his world view.”

She paused, considered. “Basically, the reason I don’t like Steve is that he’s rigid and incapable of adapting.”

And because he reminds her of herself, but she’s not going to tell Coulson that. 

+

It’s not the big things that remind her of herself when she look at Steve. Apart from being blonde and American, they have nothing in common, superficially. 

Okay, they’re both superheroes, but even in that, they’re different. Buffy’s powers come with a calling, a duty, an inescapable end. The fact that she did escape doesn’t change that, for the longest time, she knew she was born to die. 

Steve chose his powers. He chose his cause. He chose his enemy. And unlike her, sixteen and terrified in a sewer, he got to choose his end, too. 

Also, these days she goes by ‘god’ more than ‘hero’. Where Loki goes, so goes her nation, and since Loki is a god, well. 

No, what Steve reminds her of is what came after. The time after Sunnydale, when all her friend started to move on. Some built families, other built a new Council, one to be proud of. They grew up, grew out of the horrors they faced, changed. Became new people. 

Buffy couldn’t. 

She was stuck with her face, her duty and the aimlessness that came with suddenly sharing that duty with countless others. She wasn’t alone anymore and that left her completely at sea. 

Everyone around her kept moving and she just stopped. Technology kept moving, too, until she was completely lost and no-one understood it because her face was that of someone who grew up with the internet at the tips of her fingers, but the rest of her was so much older. 

When Buffy was born, computers filled rooms, phones had cords and the internet was a science fiction dream. 

She watches Steve come and go from the Tower sometimes, hands in his pockets, cap pulled into his face. He wanders, she knows, past the few things that have stayed the same in this city. The parks, the buildings. He looks for the familiar and keeps getting jostled by people with selfie sticks and tourists asking him to take their pictures with things he can’t even identify as cameras. 

He’s lost, and Buffy remembers that feeling, remembers the helplessness, the sense of drowning that came with it. 

She doesn’t like how Steve reminds her of feeling that way.

+

“You don’t feel that way anymore,” Loki tries to soothe when she finally tells him. “You survived.”

For someone who abhors the warrior culture he grew up in, he sure still carries a lot of their philosophies around with him. 

With a pout, Buffy snuggles deeper into his side, pulling the duvet higher until it covers them both, head to toe. Winter in New York is _cold_. Also, naps. Loki obliges her need to hide her face from him by tucking the bedding up even further, covering her head with it. 

When she makes no move to kick it down again, he wraps an arm around her and waits.

“It took you to pull me out of it. Asgard and the chronic case of immortality going on there helped, but mostly it was you.”

Through the blanket, she feels a kiss pressed to her head.

It’s that, more than anything, that makes her poke her head out and look up at him. “I’m not sharing you with Steve to get him out of his funk,” she complains.

“No-one asked you to.”

“No, but if we don’t do something to help him spank his inner moppet, someone’s going to kill him. Money’s on either Tony or me.”

“I could spell him happy.”

“That’s mind magics. We don’t do mind magics, honey. People frown on that.” She pats his chest in consolation. He frowns as he tugs her to lie further on his chest and she tangles their legs into a hopeless mess, chin resting on her folded hands, thinking. 

“Is there no-one the good Captain loves?” Loki asks after a while and Buffy buries her grin in his chest, because she told him he pulled her out of her depression and Loki made the jump to love without even sounding sarcastic about it. 

After Odin, after everything that happened the last few years, it feels like a victory to have him be so sure of her again. 

“No-one alive,” Buffy grumps, then stops. 

Considers. 

Her step-daughter does happen to rule over a huge portion of the dead in this dimension. 

“I think,” Loki remarks, casually, “we are overdue a visit to see my darling daughter, don’t you think so?”

+

Hel greets them at the gates, smiling brightly as Loki picks her up like she’s still a child and swings her around. She giggles, entirely unqueenly, and Buffy’s grin is so big it hurts.

Once father and daughter let go of each other, she takes her turn to hug the Queen of the Dead, squeezing tightly. 

Physically, they look to be of an age. In truth, Hel is a few centuries older, despite the fact that Buffy is her stepmother. It makes for a weird dynamic between them, one that mostly expresses itself in a lot of banter. 

Cough, family trait, cough. 

“Mummy,” Hel greets, tongue in cheek. Buffy has met Hel’s mother. Hel calls her My Lady. 

“Kid,” Buffy returns, mock stern, brushing the other woman’s hair behind her ear, the way she used to do for Dawn. Hel catches her hand, squeezes. “You feel less like death than usual. Have you been good for father?”

“I’ll have you know I’m always good for your father,” Buffy counters with a curl of tongue behind teeth.

Loki groans. “Wife…”

“Hush, honey. Your daughter is an adult. She’s fully aware that we have sex.”

He groans louder.

“But I haven’t died recently, if that’s what you mean.”

“Wonderful. We’ll make you into a proper god, yet. Now, any embarrassing tales to tell me? Father blushes ever so nicely.”

“Hel,” Loki threatens and both women giggle, ignoring him completely as they turn toward the gates leading into the realm of death, chatting loudly about Buffy’s sexventures with Hel’s father and Hel’s own affair with a minor death deity from Earth.

In the end, Loki resorts to sticking his fingers in his ears. It’s flawlessly fun.

+

Three weeks after their visit, Hel drops by the tower, scaring the pants off Clint, who screams, “Zombie!” at the top of his lungs when she appears in the middle of the common floor. 

“Have care how you speak of my daughter, Archer,” Loki reprimands, appearing in a flash of light, much like Hel, Buffy in tow. 

The slayer whacks the human over the head with one hand while hauling Hel in for a hug with the other, pointedly placing a kiss on the dead and mummified side of the queen’s face. 

“I have news,” Hel says.

+

The Queen of the Dead spoke to anyone she could find who knew Steve Rogers in life and they all agreed: if there is one person who can pull Steve out of his depression, it’s Bucky Barnes. 

So Hel went in search of Bucky Barnes’ soul.

“And you know what I found?”

“What?”

“Nothing. In all the realms of the dead, all the heavens and hells, there is no soul by the name of Bucky Barnes.”

Loki frowns, taken aback. “That means…”

“That he’s not dead, yes. Bucky Barnes is alive.”

Buffy claps her hands together, suddenly gleeful. “Well, this is starting to be interesting.”

+

Never let it be said that Buffy isn’t a master at utilizing all her resources. 

“Surely this can wait until after dinner, wife?” Loki sighs. 

Arms crossed over her chest, Buffy scowls and points him right back toward the book containing his notes on a very specific tracking spell.

He sighs again. “You have turned into a tyrant while my back was turned.”

“The faster we get Steve to stop being so mopey, the faster I can go back to disliking him for all the right reasons without feeling guilty. I like not feeling guilty.”

That earns her a narrow-eyed glare because yeah, dirty pool. But also, duh. He’s the one who married her. 

“The things I do for you,” he complains as he flicks the book open with a spark of magic and starts pulling ingredients together blindly.

Buffy beams at him.

+

James Buchanan Barnes, born March 10 1917, is currently residing in the middle of nowhere, Siberia. 

They teleport to his exact location armed with warming spells and their usual assortment of weapons, prepared for just about anything. 

(After dinner, by the way. Loki put his foot down and Buffy is, for the most part, a benevolent tyrant. Also, she really wanted anchovy pizza with pineapple.) 

‘Just about anything’ turns out to be a whole lot of people in black body armor, opening fire on them within seconds of their landing. It’s all Loki can do to throw up a spell while Buffy yells that they come in peace, hold your horses.

The answering string of expletives is really very impressive, right up until it ends in, “Hail Hydra!” and one of the goons throwing himself at Loki’s shield with a grenade clutched in each hand. 

“Splat goes the minion,” Buffy murmurs as she decides these guys are serious and darts out from behind the protective barrier to vault over a random pile of crates and knock the first two goons out. 

She works her way around the room, taking care to knock out, not kill, because, well. They did sort of crash these guys’ party. 

Even if the whole ‘Hydra’ thing is ringing some bells.

Once the room has fallen quiet, she spins to give her husband a cheeky look. “You take me to the best places.”

“This was your idea,” he points out calmly, vanishing minion splatter from his clothes and then switching them out for his usual battle armor and flicking a protection spell and shield at her.

Then, with a flashy spin of his spear, he magics open the closest door and bows her through it. 

“After you, my lady,” he tells her, smoothly, with a wicked smirk across his face. 

Buffy slinks past, hips rolling a bit more than strictly necessary as she passes out into a dank, dark hallway. Then, once the door closes behind them, she remarks, “You just want to use me as a meat shield.”

“And what glorious meat it is,” the god of tricks agrees, perfectly bland, before hitting her with yet another shield.

Buffy loves that man. 

+

They find Bucky in what looks like an oversized coffin with a built-in freezer, eyes closed, one arm a prosthetic and his hair a mess, frankly. 

“Of course you would focus on his hair,” her darling husband remarks and Buffy steps on his foot pointedly. It’s his fault, really. Everyone on Asgard is a walking, talking L’Oreal commercial. It’s given her unreasonable expectations when it comes to hair care. 

While she explains that to him, Loki starts fiddling with a nearby console and, after a few minutes, presses the right button to open the fridge coffin. 

Bucky doesn’t move, various wires and tubes extending from his body. Buffy hisses, angry, and starts carefully detaching them. Whatever happened to the man, it was not nice. After she stops whatever they were pumping into him, he rouses quickly eyes fluttering open. He looks around, then focuses on her face. 

He doesn’t ask anything, try to run, or even to move. Doesn’t attack, or defend or _anything_. Just blank. 

Frightfully so. 

Carefully, she asks, “Bucky?”

He blinks. Cocks his head to one side, considering. Then he asks, voice rough, “Who the hell is Bucky.”

She turns to Loki without really taking her eyes off the freeze-dried human. “Was that-?”

“Russian,” he confirms. After centuries on Asgard, Allspeak crept in, so Buffy understands almost any language under any sun, but she still has trouble determining what it is she’s hearing. Loki has a lot more practice at hearing the language under the automatic translation.

Why is a supposedly dead American WWII hero in a cryopod in Siberia speaking Russian?

Turning her attention back to him, she asks, “What is your name?”

His expression, marginally thawed aftr he asked his question, blanks again, like a flipped switch. “Asset. Mission?”

“Asset is your name?”

“Mission?”

“Broken record much?”

“Mission?”

Carefully, Loki takes her arm and draws her away from the guy before stepping forward himself. He raises one hand slowly and then, when no reaction is forthcoming, rests it against the other’s temple. 

Bucky flinches and Loki half closes his eyes, reaching. 

This time, Buffy doesn’t crack a joke about mind magics, just takes up a defensive position as she waits for hubby to finish working. 

+

“What do you mean, wiped?” she frowns at Loki, then at Bucky, whom they placed on the sofa of their safehouse in Spain after a bout of teleportation. He hasn’t moved since. Or blinked. 

She’s not sure he’s done that either. 

“I mean most of what made him… him, appears to have been wiped away, erased entirely. There are only fragments of his mind left, mere scraps.”

Buffy rips a wedge off her sandwich, dunks it into the salsa on her plate, and chews it slowly, contemplating. “Magic?”

“No. Far more primitive means, I’m afraid.” He finishes his own sandwich, then unwraps a chocolate bar, passing her half when she makes grabby hands. She unfolds her ham and cheese, slides the chocolate in neatly, then refolds it and bites into it with gusto. 

“You mean brainwashing,” she translates after a minute, gaze drawn back to Bucky, who sits like a wind-up doll, patient and empty. It makes her feel queasy and not a little angry. 

This was supposed to be a quick antidote to emo-Steve, damn it. Not… this. “Can you fix it?”

“I can try.”

+

Loki spends hours crouched over the human, hands at his temples, eyes moving rapidly under his lids as he tries to unfuck whatever Hydra did to him. 

Oh look, Clint’s filthy mouth finally rubbed off on her. Buffy, meanwhile, sits on the sofa with a StarkPad in hand, pulling whatever she can off the web concerning Hydra. She could have used her access to SHIELD servers, or even to Tony’s private servers, but she doesn’t want to alert anyone to what she and her husband are up to. 

Especially until they know if Bucky is still…Bucky, somewhere underneath. 

If he’s not, if there isn’t an actual person left in there, they both know what they’ll have to do. She’s not sure how many of the others would understand. 

Better to play it safe, she decides, clicks through Wikipedia articles and google searches until something like a picture forms. Most important part of that picture: Hydra is supposed to be seventy years dead and gone. 

Looking up from her research, she finds both men still motionless, sighs. “Looks like we stumbled into one hell of a mess there, boys.”

+

Eventually, Loki blinks himself back to reality, retreating from the other man immediately, an exhausted expression on his face that he quickly plasters over. 

A moment later, the thing that was once Bucky opens his eyes. He doesn’t reflexively try to run, or attack, which Buffy thinks is good, but he does scuttle backwards off the couch he was lying on until he can keep both her and Loki in his sights. 

“Bucky?” she asks, low, cautious. 

He frowns at her without losing track of Loki, who stays right where he is, across the room, just because he’s a contrary little shit. 

“Who the hell are you?” Bucky asks after a long moment. 

Buffy considers it progress.

+

The good news is, Bucky remembers being Bucky. 

The bad news is, he also remembers everything that happened in the seventy years since.

+

“I can’t.”

“But, it’s Steve. He’s your best friend, right? Don’t you wanna see him again?”

God knows, if Buffy had the chance to see the gang again, she’d take it in a heartbeat. Loki shoots her a look that says she’s transparent as glass and wraps and arm around her waist, hand resting on her stomach. 

Bucky runs angry hands through his rat’s nest of hair and curses. “Of course I do. But I… look at me! It’s not that easy!”

Loki makes a disgusted noise. He finds guilt utterly useless. “I removed all the triggers. If it’s the good Captain’s safety you are worried about, don’t bother. If you feel responsible for what you have done, then consider that you might make amends by joining the Avengers in their quest for justice. Eventually, you might wipe out the stain of accepting Hydra’s offer and murdering countless innocents in their service.”

“Offer?” Bucky snaps, suddenly stock still at the center of the room, looking like he wants to tear Loki apart. The god doesn’t look impressed at all, using his free hand to fiddle with the ends of the ribbon tied along Buffy’s forearm. “They didn’t offer me anything. I didn’t have a fucking – “

He trails off, eyes narrowing, impossibly, even further. Buffy pats her husband’s arm cheerily. “Oh, look,” she comments, “the reverse psychology stuff is working.” Then she grows serious again. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you were a weapon for Hydra to wield.”

He hesitates long enough to make it obvious that his head is still a jumbled mess. Loki did the best he could, but some things are simply gone, wiped away too many times to leave any trace. Then he nods, a jerk of the head. 

“Do you blame a gun for shooting someone?”

He huffs, angry, frustrated. “I get that,” he counters, “but-“

“But it’s not that easy,” she agrees. “Do you think not going to see Steve will help?”

He slumps, shaking his head. “But… not yet?”

+

He takes a month and then another and then another. Loki zaps himself back to New York twice for a crisis, but Buffy stays with Bucky. They bond over sparring, weird horror movies, and Steve Rogers’ occasional bouts of flaming idiocy. She drags him shopping for non-combat gear for him and a bunch of flowy dresses for herself and feeds him ice-cream and slushies.

It’s good fun and it helps, she thinks, that she doesn’t expect anything from him. Some days he still forgets his name and some days he goes for a run until he drops from exhaustion, hating himself enough to want to _hurt_. Some days he seems almost like any other twenty-something war vet. 

Buffy watches him and wonders what he would have been like without Loki’s interference, without a god cleaning up the shards of his mind, sweeping them away and fixing what was fixable. Worse, in any case. But she thinks he would have managed. Somehow, more slowly, more painfully, he would have managed. 

He seems like that kind of guy.

And doesn’t it suck something awful that Buffy actually _likes_ Steve’s best friend? She was all set to stuff him in the same drawer as Steve and be done with it, but Bucky is sarcastic and cynic and stubborn and brilliant and he reminds her, in a lot of ways, of Tony. Of Loki. Amazing, damaged men, all three of them.

Like Spike, like Angel. 

She has a type, okay?

Eventually, after three good days in a row, Bucky puts down his fork after dinner, bunches his metal hand into a fist and carefully says, “I think I’m ready.”

+

There is screaming, then there’s crying, then there’s more screaming, a lot of hugging, Tony fangirling over the metal arm and then, finally, laughter.

It’s not easy laughter, not by anyone’s standards, because Steve is doing some gross sobbing in between and Bucky sounds a little forced, more confused and a lot choked. Natasha, to everyone’s quiet surprise, looks at Bucky almost as intensely as Steve does. 

Thor is shedding a manly tear out of sheer sympathy, or maybe because he thinks his brother finally discovered altruism. Either way, Loki rolls his eyes a lot from where he’s leaning against the wall of windows of the penthouse, Buffy’s back against his chest. They’re doing that thing they do where they fold all four of their hands over her stomach and play with the ribbon aimlessly. 

They’re waiting for the soap opera at the center of the room to die down. 

Clint joins them eventually, giving them both a long look, then dropping his gaze down to their joint hands. Buffy raises an eyebrow, to which he snorts, nods, and then slides to the carpet next to them, watching the others in silence. 

Eventually they order Chinese. 

+

Buffy is just getting down to business with her spring rolls and the mustard she found in the fridge, when Steve enters the kitchen, Bucky, Nat and the rest of the gang tailing behind. 

“Thank you,” he says, toeing the ground, eyes lowered, aw-shucks and he’s so boy next door that it makes her teeth hurt. “I know neither of you like me very much, so what you did – I – thank you.”

Buffy swallows and holds up a finger. “Okay. One, I don’t like the implication that we wouldn’t have helped your buddy over there even if we hadn’t known you. Two, purely selfish reasons, I assure you. I don’t like you. We both know that. But you were being all mopey, out-of-timey and it kept reminding me of my emo sixties and seventies and made me feel guilty.” She gives him a very flat look. “I don’t like feeling guilty. So I found a way to make you less mopey and now I can dislike you in peace again. See? Totally selfish.” 

She nods at the end of her rant and goes back to her spring rolls. 

Steve stares at her blankly for a moment, before chuckling and shaking his head. “One day,” he tells her, “I’ll figure out why you’re so determined not to like me.” He looks at Loki. “Both of you.”

“Because you assume you have the right to judge people,” Loki informs him, deadpan.

Steve cringes, nods, and files the complaint away. The three of them have long since settled comfortably into not liking each other. They’re fine in a crisis and avoid each other out of it. 

“Still, thank you.”

“Selfish reasons,” Loki echoes. 

“What?” Tony quips, “You feel guilty over not liking Spangles, too?”

Loki snorts. “Not hardly. Let’s just say I was trying to build up goodwill in the good Captain and perhaps find another fighter to join the Avengers.”

“And why?” Clint asks, pointedly. 

Buffy kicks him under the table, steals a dumpling from him then nonchalantly informs them, “Because I’m pregnant. Duh."

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
